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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoLarry Crowe | associated pressCheaper feed resulted in more turkeys for the holiday table. Grocers are selling them for under $1.50 per pound, less than in 2012.

CHICAGO — The Henningsen Cold Storage warehouse in Stilwell, Okla., was so jammed with frozen
turkeys from the likes of Butterball and Cargill this year that manager Scott Mayberry turned down
requests to store about 1 million more birds, or double his inventory.

“We didn’t have any room,” said Mayberry, who manages 3.5 million cubic feet of space that is
the size of two Home Depot stores and usually holds up to 20 million pounds of frozen turkeys
before the Thanksgiving holiday in November, the peak for U.S. demand.

Rising output last year and slowing sales left domestic stockpiles tracked by the government at
four-year highs in August and September. That signals deeper seasonal discounts on retail prices
that are the highest on record going back to 1980, because about 85 percent of the 46 million birds
Americans eat at Thanksgiving meals are frozen rather than fresh, according to the National Turkey
Federation.

“We overproduced a bit in 2012, and we had quite a few excess birds left over in freezers,” said
Tom Elam, president of food-industry consultant FarmEcon in Carmel, Ind.

U.S. warehouses held 325.34 million pounds of frozen whole turkeys in September and 335.55
million pounds in August, the highest for each month since 2009, the most recent data from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture show. Stockpiles typically peak at that time of year in preparation for
Thanksgiving, said David Harvey, a USDA economist.

Farmers will sell turkeys on average for $1.01 to $1.05 a pound in the last three months of
2013, as much as 4.8 percent less than a year earlier, the USDA estimates.

The decline comes as prices fall for many commodities. The Standard & Poor’s Goldman Sachs
Commodity Index of 24 raw materials is down 3.6 percent this year, heading for the first annual
drop since the recession in 2008, led by a 38 percent plunge in corn.

The Bloomberg U.S. Treasury Bond Index lost 2.3 percent since the end of December, while the
MSCI All-Country World Index of equities rose 18 percent.

While retail meat prices tracked by the government rallied to records this year, after a 2012
surge in feed costs forced poultry and beef producers to cut output, consumers likely are paying
less for Thanksgiving birds than in 2012, said Corinne Alexander, an agricultural economist at
Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.

Whole frozen turkeys averaged $1.819 a pound in September, up 12 percent from a year earlier and
the highest since at least 1980, the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show.
Consumers won’t have to pay that much because retailers discount the birds at this time of year as
a “loss leader” to attract more shoppers, Alexander said.

With a “substantial” drop in wholesale costs, grocers expanded promotions and discounts on
Thanksgiving turkeys, with some at 59 cents a pound, said Russell Whitman of commodity researcher
Urner Barry in Toms River, N.J.

Schaul’s Signature Gourmet Foods, an Elk Grove, Ill.-based grocery distributor, is saving a few
cents a pound on every frozen turkey it buys from processors and growers in the northern Midwest,
said company president Robert Schaul.

“There are plenty of turkeys this year,” Schaul said, adding that he is selling frozen birds for
about $1.45 to $1.50 a pound, down a few pennies from last year.

While there are plenty of frozen birds, the fresh market may be short of supply. Placement of
poults, or turkeys that are a couple of weeks old or younger, were down 10 percent throughout the
summer because of high feed costs, said John Burkel, chairman of the National Turkey Federation and
a fourth-generation turkey grower in Badger, Minn.

“There were cuts all the way across the industry to keep production levels around Thanksgiving
manageable,” Burkel said. “Those cuts are going to show as we move forward in the fresh
market."

Butterball, the largest U.S. producer, said this month that it had a “limited availability” of
fresh turkeys as weight gains declined on some of its farms. The Garner, N.C.-based company expects
to “completely fulfill” all consumer orders of fresh birds by Christmas, said spokeswoman Stephanie
Llorente. Even with fewer fresh birds, Butterball’s inventory of the more common, frozen whole
birds is “ample,” and it has shipped all customers’ frozen orders, she said.